Well WP-Engine are a specialist WP hosting company, they’ve given you the reason but surprisingly not a solution? but given what they have said it would suggest this is for you to work out with them, not a huge amount we can do to help!

After extensive testing on the staging site to determine what is causing the errors when activating BuddyPress, I was able to rule out a conflict with all other plugins (including our own) as well as conflict with your theme.

The problem is that your site has almost 38,000 users. I was able to prove this by deleting all users except the “admin” and “wpengine” user from the staging site. Then, I installed and attempted to activate BuddyPress. This time it activated with no error in less than 10 seconds.

I recommend removing users from your WordPress site if possible. If not, then you should contact BuddyPress support to determine how to activate BuddyPress with so many users.

@mercime I’m reluctant to move host (unless I find another host that can guarantee a solution) as WP-Engine are normally quite good and I recommend them to most of my clients. Their advice was to come here for support on this particular issue.

@emeraldryan Their advice was wrong, why come here, what are we to suggest? You have a huge user base they are saying their server config can’t handle the processes being spawned /run or timing out trying to load those members, this is a server issue, and even if it’s a case that BP may not be well written in terms of caching member objects that for the moment is how it works.

Are these all genuine members as it is a surprisingly large number, few independent social sites do truly ever get anywhere near those sorts of numbers.

@hnla I suspected that this was probably a WP-Engine issue and that there wouldn’t be much you guys could do. I came here out of hope rather than expectation in case someone on here had experienced a similar issue and had some tips or advice.

With regards to the number of users there are a large number of fake/spam user accounts (I estimate 10,000+) that were registered on older versions of WordPress/bbPress before we upgraded and switched to CloudFlare and WP-Engine which has reduced spam considerably. We have also gradually been deleting obvious fakes but as you can appreciate this is a laborious task.

WP-Engine have refused to temporarily increase the resource limits to see if that enables the BuddyPress installation to complete. At this point I think I’ll try downloading a copy of the site and see if I can run the BuddyPress install on a local LAMP/WAMP setup and allocate 1GB+ to PHP memory.